Mac Salvo: With the price of oil hovering around $44 and U.S. oil inventories at record highs the general consensus is that the economy will soon see a boost in consumer spending as Americans will take their gas savings and spend it at retail stores.

But there’s a lot more going on with oil on a geo-political scale than can be pumped into a 30-second propaganda soundbite from financial pundits and talking heads. While lower prices may seem Read more…

Mac Salvo: The Davos World Economic Summit has long been a parade for the insider agenda, putting the power players’ plans for the world’s economies on display as a preview to their playing out for the rest of the year.

But so far, the 2015 elite retreat in the Swiss Alps has proven to be full of apprehension, and even horror… Read more…

Andrew Topf: In a documentary that aired recently on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular The Fifth Estate program, an allegory of Vladimir Putin was presented. The wily Russian president was described growing up in a shabby St. Petersburg apartment, where he would often corner rats. Read more…

Kurt Nimmo: British Prime Minister David Cameron has reacted to the Greek election and the rejection of globalist austerity measures by saying the victory of Syriza in the Greek general election over the weekend will “increase economic uncertainty across Europe.” Read more…

Michael Snyder: Radical leftists have been catapulted to power in Greece, and that means that the European financial crisis has just entered a dangerous new phase. Syriza, which is actually an acronym for “Coalition of the Radical Left” in Greek, has 36 percent of the total vote with approximately 80 percent of the polling stations reporting. The current governing party, New Democracy, only has 28 percent of the vote. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras is promising to Read more…

Mike Gleason: European central bankers brought out their monetary bazookas and vowed to load them with more than a trillion euros. That’s the total size of the quantitative easing program announced on Thursday by European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi. The 60 billion euro (or $68 billion) per month bond-buying campaign aims to revive price inflation and stimulate nominal economic growth in the Eurozone. Read more…

Adan Salazar: A Papa John’s pizza franchise outside of Atlanta made headlines last week when one of their delivery drivers used a gun to turn the tables on some thieves, but the real story was whether or not the driver would be allowed to keep her job.
Last Saturday, a 27-year-old female driver arrived at a Read more…

Axel Merk: Is European Central Bank (ECB) head Draghi’s determination to purchase government bonds turning Europe into a banana republic? What are the implications not only for the euro and U.S. dollar, but gold, stocks and bonds? Our analysis shows that conventional wisdom may be proven wrong in more than one way. Read more…

Michael Snyder: During his State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening, Barack Obama promised to make life better for middle class families. Of course he has also promised to do this during all of his other State of the Union addresses, but apparently he still believes that there are people out there that are buying what he is selling. Read more…

Mac Salvo: All over the world central banks are printing money. Trillions upon trillions of dollars, euros, yen and yuan are being injected into the global economy. The immediate effect, of course, is rising asset prices because most of that money ends up in the hands of Read more…

Edge Trader Plus: It would seem that last week’s rally in gold was Swiss National Bank-driven, plain and
simple. It is difficult to get a handle on the ramifications of what just happened with the
Swiss “unpegging” from the Euro. It was becoming prohibitively expensive for the SNB
to keep buying Euros and trashing their own Read more…

Modern life causes me often to consider that Shakespearian question. We’re immersed in a never-ending stream of words, images and ideas deliberately designed to trick us into believing things that are only partly true, or not true at all.

The science of modern advertising is the prime example. In that world, representation and imagery are Read more…